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Saturday, January 4, 2014

#857: Richard Land

Richard D. Land is the president, or recently retired president, of the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, radio host of
Richard Land Live! (which closed down in 2012 after several cases of plagiarism
were disclosed), and executive editor of The Christian Post.
He was formerly the president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention,
a post he held for some 25 years (and was succeeded by the apparently clinically delusional Russell Moore).
And as usual, you can be pretty damn sure that an organization that contains
both “ethics” and “liberty” in their name is an organization devoted to the
exact opposite – their “Richard Land Distinguished Service Award,” was in 2013
awarded to none other than Tony Perkins.
A rather telling example is Land’s response to the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling, which he described as a crime against humanity and “a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror.” (He also
said that since one side argued that ID was science and the other side argued
that it wasn’t, the judge had no right to decide which one was right, which
suggests a rather poor understanding of what judges are supposed to do.) Needless
to say, Land is an unrepentant fundamentalist, advocating a fundamentalist
biblical position on issues from religious liberty to the economy.

In 2001 president Bush appointed Land to the US Commission
on International Religious Freedom, a position he had when he wrote the
infamous Land letter, an open letter to President Bush by leaders of the religious
right in 2002 outlining a “just war” argument in support of the subsequent
military invasion of Iraq. Bush was sufficiently impressed to reappoint him
twice (he served until 2011). (Indeed, Land believes that God intervened in the 2004 election to make sure Bush was elected.)

Let’s start with the scandals. In the March 31, 2012 edition
of Richard Land Live!, Land accused the Obama administration and civil rights
leaders of using the Trayvon Martin case to deliberately stir up racial tension and “gin up the black vote for an African-American president who is in deep,
deep, deep trouble for re-election.” That earned him some criticism. (In fact,
Land had lifted most of his commentary from a column by the frothingly lunatic Moonie Times contributor Jeffrey Kuhner.)
Land defended himself by trying to argue that Obama started it by “turning he Trayvon Martin shooting into a national issue,” but even his
Southern Baptist friends didn’t quite buy that. After the subsequent discovery
of extensive plagiarism Land lost his radio show and resigned as President of
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Land on social issues

Land is a signatory to the Manhattan Declaration and well-known for his bigoted lapses into hyperbole and conspiracy theories –
a typical example being, perhaps, his claim that “gay activists” seek to
destroy marriage in order to achieve full-blown “sexual paganization of society”.
To this end homosexuals are “recruiting” children, which is a form a child
abuse, all the while claiming that homosexuality is “incomprehensible” and to be blamed on the devil.
(In fairness, one can see why homosexuality is incomprehensible to Land, the
source of incomprehension being, of course, the density of his bigotry.) He
also – as so many others dimly realizing that their other arguments are rather
poor – feebly claimed that repealing DADT would “bring God’s judgment on our nation,” and tried to compare his battle against
gay marriage with MLK’s fight for racial justice (which should probably be understood in light of his Trayvon Martin comments).
It is still telling that Land (after comparing Obama and Democrats to Nazis)
has repeatedly called for civility and appealed to decency in the debate over
gay marriage.
Indeed, in 2012 Land came up with what he deemed “a modest proposal” that he
hoped everyone could agree on:
Ban gay marriage.

But it isn’t just gay marriage; Land has actually recently argued that single mothers have a moral obligation to put their kids up for
adoption.
And here is his contribution to the War on Christmas – those who don’t celebrate it the
way he likes (e.g. recognizing Santa as just another Golden Calf) are
apparently damning themselves to hell.

Land vs. Science and Reason

Of course, Land is also a hardcore creationist (as evinced by his Kitzmiller v. Dover comment above), and his arguments for
creationism consist of the standard creationist PRATTs (no, he displays absolutely no awareness of the science or how science works):

- Darwin didn’t know about single-celled organisms since
he did not have microscopes (false; microscopes had achieved the Rayleigh limit
in the 19th century, and Darwin wrote papers about microorganisms).

Diagnosis: Notable for having been one of the movers and
shakers in the anti-enlightenment movement whose firm stance against reason,
sanity and decency, Land is hopefully somewhat neutralized by now. Still.

1 comment:

Land urges Christians to remain engaged in culture war issues because we live in a country “wracked by demonic activity.” What he has in mind is, of course, zeh gays. Here Land warns that God may punish (might kill them) gay Christians (heresy, you know) and that Obama's presidency is God's judgment on America ... because he is pro gay rights? No, that doesn't make sense. But this is Richard Land. His argument for why surrogacy is child abuse hardly makes much more sense.